The Onion

As Peer Gynt says, I am an onion. Layers on top of layers, hiding a core.

Who am I?

Am I...

.../the things I like/the things I experience/the synthesizer of theory/the intertext/the death of the artist/the quest for meaning/...

?

Soon these layers just give way to more layers, though, and I have not found the center.

Who are you, Justin? I am but myself.

[310 Posts. 1 Year. End Blog.]

Three Lists in Three Media

Some of my favourite things at this particular point in time, checks watch, and not necessarily the best:

Ten Books

the age of reason, jean-paul sartre
crime and punishment, fyodor dostoevsky
the crying of lot 49, thomas pynchon
the dead father, donald barthelme
the double hook, sheila watson
franny and zooey, j.d. salinger
nineteen eighty-four, george orwell
selected poems, t.s. eliot
the sun also rises, ernest hemingway
what we talk about when we talk about love, raymond carver

Ten Albums

come on pilgrim, pixies
enter the wu-tang (36 chambers), wu-tang clan
freak city soundtrack, material issue
a grand don't come for free, the streets
hunky dory, david bowie
in the aeroplane over the sea, neutral milk hotel
kala, m.i.a.
liquid swords, gza
london calling, the clash
odessey and oracle, the zombies

Ten Films

The Battle of Algiers (1966)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Chinatown (1974)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Dead Ringers (1988)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
The Searchers (1956)
Straw Dogs (1971)
Taxi Driver (1976)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

and 90 More for Fun in No Order

Ace in the Hole (1951)
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)
Alien (1979)
All the Real Girls (2003)
Akira (1988)
Annie Hall (1977)
The Apartment (1960)
Army of Darkness (1992)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Back to the Future (1985)
Barry Lyndon (1975)
Beetle Juice (1988)
Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
Blue Velvet (1986)
Bottle Rocket (1996)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Brief Encounter (1946)
Casablanca (1942)
Children of Men (2006)
The Conversation (1974)
Cool Hand Luke (1967)
The Dark Knight (2008)
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Dazed and Confused (1993)
The Departed (2006)
Don't Look Now (1973)
Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Evil Dead II (1987)
Far from Heaven (2002)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
Fight Club (1999)
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
The Fly (1986)
The French Connection (1971)
Get Carter (1971)
Ghost Busters (1984)
Ghost World (2001)
The Godfather (1972)
The Godfather: Part II (1974)
Goodfellas (1990)
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
High Fidelity (2000)
A History of Violence (2005)
Hud (1963)
The Incredibles (2004)
Jarhead (2005)
Jaws (1975)
Jurassic Park (1993)
The King of Comedy (1982)
The Last Detail (1973)
The Last of the Mohicans (1992)
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)
The Limey (1999)
Marathon Man (1976)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
Mona Lisa (1986)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Office Space (1999)
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Out of the Past (1947)
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)
The Prestige (2006)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Ratatouille (2007)
The Red Shoes (1948)
Repo Man (1984)
Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Robocop (1987)
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Rushmore (1998)
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)
Se7en (1995)
The Shining (1980)
Shivers (1975)
Solaris (1972)
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
Star Wars (1977)
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)
The Thin Man (1934)
The Thing (1982)
The Third Man (1948)
Three Kings (1999)
Unforgiven (1992)
Vertigo (1958)
Written on the Wind (1956)
Zodiac (2007)

Album Listen List: November 2008

in listening order

live at the apollo, james brown
entertainment!, gang of four
this is england ost, various artists

God, do you think maybe I should listen to some new music? Good thing 'tis the season of best-of year-end music lists.

Film Watch List: November 2008

*film has been seen previously/rewatching
†watched in theatre

in viewing order
I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
Martin Scorsese Presents: Val Lewton: Man in the Shadows (2008)
The Thing from Another World (1951)
'Breaker' Morant (1980)
Mr. Hulot's Holiday (1953)
Mon oncle (1958)
Play Time (1967)
M. Butterfly (1993)
if.... (1968)
The Kite Runner (2007)
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
Night of the Lepus (1972)
This Is England (2006)
Factory Girl (2006)
The Hoax (2006)
In the Valley of Elah (2007)
The Last Mimzy (2007)
The Great McGinty (1940)
Atonement (2007)
The Incredible Hulk (2008)

Stats
Films watched: 20
Films previously seen: 0
Films watched in theatres: 0

Average # of films watched per day: 0.67

By Decade
1930s: 0
1940s: 2
1950s: 3
1960s: 2
1970s: 1
1980s: 1
1990s: 1
2000s: 10

Conclusion: November started to taper off, but there should be a renaissance of viewership come early to mid December when I have some time off. Just in time too, I need to rinse the terrible taste of haggis out of my mouth.

Children of the Atom

Modern streamofconsciousness meets the postmodern signifying event, splitting the atom, nuclear fission, becomes reverse osmosis dialogue coition as one, the monologue:

Y'know, lately Ive been thinking about all of postmodernism, and even the beat movement etcetera that preceded it as just straight up a reaction to thermonuclear war like, just the very notion, the unthinkable idea that in seconds we could destroy our entire planet, everyone just completely threw the notion that things were important out the window and decided to live it up with the time we have left on this doomed planet and maybe even the contemporary environmental movement is the same sort of instinct of trying to preserve whats so delicate exactly, the trinity tests, life in a post-atomic world, everything changed but maybe that puts too fine a point on it though, to say its just a straight up cause and effect relationship, but maybe not, yeah, exactly when we saw ourselves from the moon, we realized how small we are but when we realized that we could just destroy ourselves, our accomplishments, our big fucking skyscrapers none of that mattered, was noticeable from space: this is it, this is where the postmodern condition comes from, even if we never use it like, so much just comes back to this idea, all of game theory, most of ethics, especailly contract ethics: it all comes back to the mushroom cloud, irreversible, hair-trigger responses to others actions, living life under the gun, mutually assured destruction, reasoning in situations of ignorance, risk, pure competition (zero-sum games i.e. we both are destoryed), mixed competition, co-operative games, it really was all invented after the bomb. Duck and cover. Talk about a pathetic resistence to your own futility: "you're not helpless!! Get under your desk, you're still in control, we promise!" It's the culture of fear, we have to scare our own people into submission: the commies will kill you, the terrorists will kill you, drugs will kill you-- and there is one person who can save you: me: "look just let me take all this money ear-marked for ummm medicine and education give it to my buddies...ahem the military industrial complex and we'll keep you safe, we'll go kill them over there!" Everything is kind of a result of this atomic moment-- what it really means that we can be destroyed in seconds. The phrase "atomic children" comes to mind, is too familiar, how this thing capable of blowing us all into stardust is really the key to great strength.

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Metempsychosis

Philosophy is the love of wisdom or often knowledge, but it is also very much concern for the soul. At times, it is a very obvious psychomachia or "battle for the soul." This is done through psychogogia or "a leading of the soul." That's what philosophy is, but frankly it's all Greek to me.

Metempsychosis, on the other hand, is the "transmigration of the soul." The soul aspires to freedom. The soul, like inspiration or the creative spirit, moves from one vessel to another. The soul is the text and the text is alive and produces new texts. Transmigration is intertextuality. Layers and layers, the palimpsest of the soul, like lives and lives. Thus the soul (the "text") miraculously returns to life, when it informs another.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Fifty-Two: Memory hole
Week Fifty-One: The Black Book
Week Fifty: Spear of Longinus
Week Forty-Nine: Moral panic
Week Forty-Eight: "The Move"
Week Forty-Seven: Cloaca
Week Forty-Six: Ship of fools
Week Forty-Five: Slattery Report
Week Forty-Four: Isolationism
Week Forty-Three: Foxy
Week Forty-Two: Young Woman with Unicorn
Week Forty-One: Cosmicism
Week Forty: Prisoner's dilemma
Week Thirty-Nine: Demimonde
Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

The Duelists: Alexander Pushkin

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin lived from seventeen ninety-nine until eighteen thirty-seven and was a poet of the Russian Empire. He was also a Romantic, a Freemason, a Greek revolutionary, social critic and Soviet forbearer, and the poet of Russia.

While in great debt and his wife a huge fucking slut, Alexander Pushkin's honour was offended by Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d'Anthès, French émigré, lieutenant in the Knights Guards of the Empress and Pushkin's brother-in-law of one month having married the sister of Pushkin's wife and huge fucking whore, Natalya. Consequently, d'Anthès shot Pushkin, mortally wounding him in the stomach. Pushkin managed to rise for a return volley at d'Anthès but succeeded in only wounding him lightly in the arm. D'Anthès was with Pushkin's giant fucking slut-whore of a wife, Natalya, cuckolding Pushkin. Still, while on his deathbed, he would pardon d'Anthès of any wrongdoing. D'Anthès is said to have quipped, "Well, tell him that I forgive him, too." Alexander Pushkin died two days later.

The year was 1836.



In Media

D'Anthès is purportedly the namesake for the title character of Alexandre Dumas' novel The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantès.

Common Misconceptions: The New Millennium

Seven/eight years later and I'm still bitter about this.

There's no year zero. The calendar starts with year 1. Thus a grouping of one thousand years, a millennium, ends when the calendar changes to a year ending in 1.

Now the coming of the the "new" millennium in the late nineties was hot shit, acted like it owned the place, didn't take off its shoes, and put its cold, sweaty drink glasses directly on top of the wood surfaces of your furniture without a coaster intermediary. A factor in this was Y2K hysteria to be sure. The story broke ahead of time, because computers were going to think when the calendar switched from 1999 to 2000 that since they only had a two-digit year marker programmed in that the calendar was actually going from 1999 to 1900. And since all computers are in fact working time machines, computers were going to send the world itself back to 1900 and all the technological advances of the twentieth century would become anachronistic and subsequently disappear by way of self-fixing paradoxes.

Also, every digit in the year was going to change and there would be three zeros and that's really cool guys. Zeros be rolling over like on your analog display clock.

Now let me quote a bit of popular culture minutiae, "The Millennium" episode (820) of Seinfeld:

Jerry: Oh, that's interesting, because as everyone knows, since there was no year zero, the millennium doesn't begin until the year two-thousand and one. Which would make your party, one year late, and thus, quite lame.

Jerry is right and he's wrong here. Newman's party would be one year early, not late. Still since that is when everyone else is celebrating the new millennium, it would instead be lame to be the hipster douchebag who chooses to celebrate the new millennium on the night of December 31, 2000 when the general population ("normies") are asking, "Wasn't that last year?"

Ironically (irony: that's still a thing, right?) none of this matters as calendars are superfluous and based around arbitrary starting dates to begin with, and nations systematically changed from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian over the late middle centuries of the second millennium anyway. Plus when we talk of the decades, we talk about the eighties as being from 1980 to 1989, and not 1981 to 1990 because calling '90 a part of the eighties is retarded and counterfactual. All one really needs is an almanac to follow the phases of the moon.

Temporal Incongruities: Shakespeare and Cervantes

William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes died on the same date, 23 April 1616, but not on the same day.

Star Trek and the Future State of Health Care

Space ships are like submarines in space. A typical nuclear submarine has a crew of over 80. Okay, in Star Trek's optimistic vision of the future, space ships have their luxuries and aren't the cramp, pressure capsules that submarines are. Since, these starfarers are not just explorers but military, one forgets the nature of medicine in the field. Submarines don't typically have room on board for medical centers and doctors and resort to using super-medics (this is a bit of an assumption as my limited research on the matter turned up no actually compelling statistics). But as stated Star Trek presents an optimistic vision of the future, and while getting in the occasional skirmish, there is typically always a doctor stationed.

Now one of the defining statistics for a high quality of life is the ratio of doctors to patients. According to the WHO, Cuba has a doctor for every 170 residents. Data as recent as 1999, suggested Cuba has a doctor to patient ratio of 58.2 to 10 000. Of course, Cuba's ratio is exceptionally high, but is a fair point of comparison because an optimistic future should have an exceptionally high ratio of something positive.


So I propose to look at the ratio of Doctors/Crew Members:

The USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) (a constitution-class ship) of The Original Series had a crew of 430. This Enterprise had a one Dr. Leonard McCoy (as well as at least two nurses, however rarely seen/mentioned).

The USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) (a galaxy-class ship) of The Next Generation had a crew of 1014, not including dolphins. This Enterprise had Dr. Crusher as its Chief Medical Officer which implies subordinates although the size of her sickbay is unclear.

The USS Voyager (NC-74656) (an intrepid-class ship) of Voyager has a crew of 150-200. To be fair, any doctors seemed to die when the ship became lost in space and they had to resort to a single emergency hologram doctor.


I'm not exactly sure what conclusions can be drawn from this. Will a doctor-to-patient ratio be important in the future or will its influence on the quality of life be superseded by the advance of technology. Can technology ever truly replace doctors? Or does the fact that it could make a doctor's job easier increase the number of patients that doctor could effectively serve?

These are the questions I think good/interesting sci-fi asks and I'd be more interested in people exploring those answers than how Kirk is going to avoid the giant styrofoam rock thrown by that giant lizard man. Sure, that's an important moral question, but let's not forget the more sociological questions too.

(Space Ship Data Source: Memory Alpha)

Words Are Our Friends: Friend

Friend. Fuhrieeend. Frined. Friend. FRIEND. F-R-I-E-N-D. Sometimes when I see the word friend written out, I just don't recognize it. What is this word? I ponder to myself. Is that spelled right? "I before E except after C"--Isn't that the rule? What is this shit? It's got to be spelled right. But then I'm like no, friend, that's right, that's how it's spelled, I know it deep down. Instincts are wrong, conditioning is right. I don't know where this aphasia comes from, but suspect it must be psychological, right? And just like our language determines the manner in which we think, I believe it must be the manner in which I think that overdetermines my reaction to the word friend.

Top Five XI: Posts That Aren't About What They're About

1. Music Review: Challengers
2. Weekly Wikipedia Find: Slattery Report
3. Top Five IX: J.D. Salinger Characters
4. Inspired Moments, Terrible Movies: Captain America
5. The Titular

Underappreciated Punctuation III: The Tilde

Besides turning Lemonade into the Mexican Lemoñade, the tilde is useless I think we can all agree.

































Oh, you wanted a encomium for the tilde? Fine, obliged.

Besides its diacritical usage, the tilde, when not being used as a swung dash, also has the punctilious use of abbreviation. However, such usage should be considered obs.